1. Field of the Invention
This invention relates generally to network monitoring systems and, more specifically, a method for monitoring mission critical network infrastructures and providing application support for client networks.
2. Description of the Related Art
As we approach the new millennium, computer networks have migrated from single server systems to mission critical network infrastructures. A mission critical network infrastructure is a network that runs an electronic commerce site or provides real time data to a plurality of users. These network infrastructures generally must remain online at all times and can afford little or no down time. Devices on these networks usually are comprised of many different types and brands of network devices, such as Windows NT servers, Unix servers, routers, and terminal servers. For example, if, per chance, a Unix billing system were to fail, quite possibly, an entire electronic commerce site could lose large sums of money.
What makes maintaining these systems even harder is the fact that the devices on the network are generally proprietary and do not conform to any one standard. For example, to configure a firewall from outside a private network, a nonstandard port may be used, such as port 2058. In fact, even devices that use standard ports sometimes use different methods to indicate availability. For example, a router may use well-known Simple Network Management Protocol (SNMP) traps to indicate availability, whereas a well-known telnet server provides a “login” prompt when a client connects to a port 23. Moreover, if a network contains 50 telnet servers, even though they respond the same way, monitoring each one becomes an arduous task.
In addition, displaying all devices on a computer screen located within a large network is difficult since viewing techniques generally present devices within the network as icons of equal size. That is, large networks, if viewed in its entirety on an standard viewing screen, would be so large as to make each icon necessarily very small, so that they do not occlude on another; thus making all icons impossible to view.
Although existing monitoring systems can monitor a particular network device or service, currently there is no way to monitor entire networks efficiently. With large mission critical networks, even if the administrator ultimately locates a problem with a device or service, it may take some time for the administrator to determine the cause of the problem.
It is therefore desirable to improve existing network monitoring systems.